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May the winds weaken
The Rev. Dr. Victoria Weinstein offers a prayer for those in the path of Hurricane Florence.
May the winds weaken. May they be unraveled like a knotted chain and smoothed and soothed. May the mass that we are calling Florence be broken into pieces and dispersed and made weak so that we can breathe a sigh of relief that the coast was spared. Amen. Rest well.
Rest as well as you can. (Facebook, September 12)
Sharpening our pitchforks
The Rev. Dr. Carl Gregg suggest that it’s time to sharpen our pitchforks and close the income inequality gap.
[What] remains within our control is whether we sit back and accept the current trajectory of rising inequality—or whether we do everything within our power to build the world we dream about. . . .
I invite you to open the imagination of your mind and the compassion of your heart to what becomes possible whenever we all join together in solidarity across ever-increasing circles of inclusion. Together we can accomplish far more than any of us can alone. (Carl Gregg, September 12)
This is what matters
Kim Hampton writes, “The respectifying of Botham Shem Jean is sickening.”
He was minding his own damn business when somebody, who has no business being a cop, shot him dead. And that somebody is getting PAID while on leave for shooting him.
That is what matters. (Facebook, September 7)
The Rev. Ashley Horan writes “A Very Long Post, From the Chronicles of an Interracial Couple Raising a Multiracial Child Under White Supremacy.”
When Karen picked Aspen (3 years old) up from school today, the teacher told her that she had overheard Aspen saying, “Brown people are smelly.” The teacher was mystified, because she knows us, and knew that didn’t come from us. Karen suspected that Aspen had heard another kid at school saying that, and repeated it. So we decided to talk to her at dinner tonight. (Facebook, September 12)
The dance of relationship
The Rev. Joanna Fontaine Crawford borrows an extended dance metaphor from the film Dirty Dancing to explain the concept of self-differentiation.
In relationships—romantic, friends, co-workers, church members, etc.—we connect and stay connected with someone else. We dance together, in mutual consent, taking responsibility for our own dance space. No wishy-washy spaghetti arms, and no blustering across the other person's boundaries. (Boots and Blessings, September 11)
In retirement, the Rev. Theresa Novak receives the gift of, once again, being a congregant ministered to by her minister.
I have lived that ministerial relationship from both sides now, and I know that it can be an incredible and special gift, a bond of tenderness, trust, and love. I have missed being in the congregant side of that kind of relationship, and I was not really aware of how much. But now, somewhat miraculously, I am feeling what it is like to have a minister again. (Sermons, Poetry and Other Musings, September 9)
This is how tragedies happen
Doug Muder responds to “Anonymous.”
This is how tragedies happen: because everyone in a position to prevent them has some special reason not to. And usually they all have some way of telling the story that makes them sound like heroes. . . .
But there’s nothing virtuous about setting yourself up as a permanent unelected government-within-the-government, and tasking yourself to implement a policy agenda the voters rejected. Elections ought to be consequential, and if those consequences are too much for the country to bear, then the president should be removed by legal means. (The Weekly Sift, September 10)
The Rev. Amy Zucker Morgenstern doesn’t hold back: she thinks Donald Trump is not fit to serve as president.
Whatever a president’s policy positions, be they leftist, liberal, conservative, libertarian, the person needs to be able to see through flattery, risk being seen as a failure, absorb new information, work with a team, and change course. Trump’s Narcissistic Personality Disorder is complicated by impulsiveness and cognitive deficits, but even if it were not, it would be as disqualifying an ailment as coma or severe brain damage. A person with untreated, severe NPD cannot be a competent president of the United States, period. (Sermons in Stones, September 6)
The Rev. Amy Shaw measures what we have lost in the seventeen years since 9/11.
On that day no one stopped to ask “Are you a citizen?” before they stopped to help. . . . Dust and poisons coated people until no one could tell what color anyone had started as. People cried together, cheered together, hugged strangers and were covered in the blood of others together. . . .
And then we went on.
We washed off the dust, we healed up the physical wounds.
We buried the dead.
We built monuments and we gave speeches.
And in 2016 we elected a monster to the highest seat in our country. A monster who would destroy all that called us to join together on that terrible day. (Facebook, September 11)